Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
'Til it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
"Big Yellow Taxi"
Joni Mitchell, 1970
He is long dead now, but he still deserves his privacy, so I'll call him Mr. Smith. He was a weathered old mountain man from deep in the coves and hollows of western North Carolina.
He and his wife lived a few miles down a dirt track carved into steep hillsides. At one edge of it, rock faces jumped up so close you could touch them without stretching in your seat. At the other edge, the land dropped sharply to a river bottom far below. The little road was not wide enough for two cars to pass. Shallow turnouts had been scooped out of the hills here and there. If two drivers met, one backed up to the nearest turnout to let the other by.
You walked the last 50 yards or so to the Smiths' place. The slope up to their dooryard was too steep to drive. Their little cinder-block house was tucked against a second slope. Around it, the walls of a small valley swept up and out. I once asked him how much of it they owned. He said everything I could see had been in his family for generations. He called it "my mountain."
Mr. Smith was in his '80s when I knew him, born and reared almost all the way to manhood in the late 19th Century. He knew all the old mountain ways, and still kept many. He knew how to make a toothbrush from a sugarbush branch, and a broom from nothing more than a hardwood tree limb. I suspected that Mr. Smith knew how to make a little liquor, too, but he never said and I never asked.
He had piped a cold mountain spring through the rear wall of his house. It pooled in a broad concrete basin, then flowed out to a creek that bubbled through his front yard. Jars of food stood in the basin, which served as their refrigerator.
The best spot for a barn was split by that creek. Mr. Smith had felled tree trunks across it, and built the barn upon them, straddling the stream.
During his working years, he had farmed the flatter parts of his land. In old age he turned to building houses now and then. That was how I met him. He was putting up a vacation house for a friend of mine. He'd designed it in pencil, on a shirt cardboard that he carried in the bib of his overalls. He built it with only the help of an 18-year-old lad who ferried him to the site and did the heavy lifting.
It was a complete, three-bedroom job with a barn-style, gambrel roof (Mr. Smith called it a "roundin' rafters" roof.) On one end were two floors of living quarters. On the other was a great room open all the way to the roof line. Much of the end wall was covered by a stone fireplace with a massive wooden beam for a mantel. Mr. Smith had fashioned the beam from wood on his land. He had built the fireplace himself from field stone that also came from his land.
I was never sure how well Mr. Smith could read or write. But his gifts with stone and wood were remarkable. He added to my friend's house touches we could never have imagined. The door-latching mechanisms were hand-made of wood in the old-fashioned way. They worked as well as any you could buy. The gutters and downspouts were of wood in the old way, too. And to carry water away from the foundation, he made spillways from slabs of wild stone. Nature could have placed them herself.
In time, I asked Mr. Smith to build a little cottage for me. My friend had recommended me. You had to be recommended to Mr. Smith.
And my friend advised me: The mountain people have their own way about some things. They take pride in doing a proper job of what they're paid to do. But their attitude is that they are working with you, not for you. At some point Mr. Smith will make it clear, with words or some kind of gesture, that this is his view. It will be important for you to respond.
I asked: How will I know when that is happening?
My friend said: You'll know. If you pay attention, you'll know.
Sure enough, one very early morning, Mr. Smith roused me with an insistent knock. He said: I need your help with this ladder.
Still in my pajamas, I helped him carry a ladder down the lane from my unfinished place to my friend's. When we put the ladder down, Mr. Smith looked me in the eye for a conspicuous extra beat and said: Thank you. I'm grateful for your help.
I paid him by the hour. (He kept track on the back side of that shirt cardboard in his bib overalls.) And I began to sense that he spent more time at my site than I was paying him for. When I asked about it, I discovered that he didn't charge me when rain stopped him from working. But neither did he go home. If he thought the rain wouldn't last, he and the helper sat in the cab of their truck, sometimes for hours, waiting to get a little more done before they left for the day.
I asked him to let me pay at least a little something for his hours on my site, even if he wasn't able to work the whole time. He wouldn't hear of it.
When I go to the mountains nowadays, I think of Mr. Smith. I think of that morning of the ladder, when he and I silently agreed that I had bought his time but not him. I think of his refusal to accept pay for idle time, and of learning to understand that the refusal was for his own sake and not for mine. I remember his knowing how to get a living from hard land, and how to make from a length of wood or a mute rock something that did a job and pleased the eye, too. I remember the smile in his eyes when he looked up the slopes of "his mountain," and the warmth in his voice when he described remote spots where the rhododendron blooms were just right and the mountain laurel covered whole hillsides.
When I go to the mountains nowadays, I think of all the craft of life that was in Mr. Smith and is now gone. I'm reminded of what we're covering over with our golf courses and theme parks and bars and boutiques. We are covering not just a landscape but a culture.
We who were priveleged to glimpse it should erect markers. We should declare: Something else was here before. Something worthwhile. Something that mattered.
I hope this counts a little in that direction.
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